Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Thursday February 28, 2013 @05:29PM
from the causes-peak-oil dept.

Sabbetus writes "Bitcoin tops its previous all-time high of $31.91 and in doing so it proves to be quite a resilient virtual currency. To the supporters of Bitcoin this does not come as a surprise, since we have seen the likes of WordPress, Reddit and Mega embrace it. Recently Namecheap also confirmed that they will start accepting bitcoins. The new record price was reached on the same day that Mt. Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, reached an agreement with CoinLab to manage the exchange's operations in the U.S. and Canada."
A far cry from the end of 2011.

Deflation? When bitcoins cost more dollars, that's deflation, because bitcoin now buys more than before. Inflation is when the bitcoin buys less. What do you think those words mean? You probably got confused, because deflation of bitcoins is inflation of dollars.

Once Bitcoin reaches some level of critical mass, it will attract the attention of the entrenched banking system and their lap dog regulators. If it takes outlawing the possession of graphics cards to stop mining, they'll get that law passed.

If your hard drive will serve as a bank or credit card, you are a serious threat to the banking industry.

No, the established banking system will see it as another forex system to make money on by speculating and all that.

Hell, Wall Street is probably looking at ways to set up fractional bitcoin systems so they can do HFT in bitcoins,

The only way for bitcoin to reach critical mass and attract the attention of regulators would be for those Wall Street bankers to have caused a lot of harm - either by sending so many transactions through the system that everyone hashing through gets overloaded to the point of being unable to rollback (if you're doing a trade every millisecond, and it takes 10 minutes on average to confirm a transaction, you could ptentially send 600,000 transactions through...).

Bitcoin hasn't yet attracted the attention at a high level - because it's the perfect currency to do stuff in. Banks love unregulated things, so they're going to find ways to make money through bitcoins before they're going to cry foul through a government regulator.

When the banks start offering the usual array of futures, options, trading, etc., in bitcoins, that's when regulators may start picking up on it.

Right now the problem is the increasing value of a bitcoin - at $30 each, 1 bitcoin is seriously going to overpay for a lot - I mean, if 1 bitcoin buys you a 2 year domain registration, that's about 50% more than what it would cost regularly. Or say I ran a store offering 10 music tracks per bitcoin or 2 albums. Now with it going higher, it would mean having to let customers overpay, or give them stuff they don't want (e.g., 25 tracks, or 2 albums + 5 tracks), which if you only want ONE song, is kind of annoying.

The banking system loves bitcoin. They're just trying to figure out how to exploit it to make money. And they're not going to run to any government regulator to reign in on potential windfalls.

Comparing Bitcoin to a small nation is actually a valid one. $33/coin at the moment x 10.84 million coins in circulation = $358 million in circulation. That puts it between Swaziland and Burundi, two small African nations. It just happens that the "Bitcoinians" are a distributed online nation, instead of tied to geography. That there are 23 smaller national money supplies, and 167 larger ones does not invalidate Bitcoin, in fact it shows it has already reached the scale for a national currency, if not the world's largest. Given the value was trivial as little as 2 years ago, that is quite an achievement. It show how fast adoption can be for an internet-based tool.

Bitcoin is not an anonymous currency. Every single Bitcoin transaction is permanently recorded in a public, globally replicated database. True, there may not be any way to link the transactions to your identity now (that you know of anyway!) but you don't just have to worry about whether anyone can now, you have to worry about whether they'll figure out some way to extract it from the transaction history in the future as well.

For instance, for years there was a ridiculous bug that made it a lot easier to figure out that different addresses belonged to the same person than the public documentation claimed it was. The bug's been fixed now, but all the past transactions affected by it are still affected and there's nothing anyone can do about that.

The "old money" is still sitting on most of the coins and will crash the value again by cashing in even a small percentage. The Bitcoin economy is just too small compared to the wealth of the early adopters.

Someone cashed out half a million worth today in one order, market ate them up and begged for more.

The problem with a deflationary currency is that it discourages investment. If your currency is deflating by, say, 1% per annum, you can, without any risk at all, increase the buying power of your money just by sitting on it.

This is in comparison to an inflationary currency where, if you don't invest it, its buying power eventually dwindles away to nothing. It encourages people with a large reserve of money to make it available to others via the mechanism of investing.